Instant Messaging

French-based location sharing app Zenly hopes to be the next Snapchat and co-founder Antoine Martin came onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt London to talk about how it plans to get there.
The original idea came from Foursquare check-ins but Zenly allows users to check-in and share their location with friends and family. Martin spent two to three years with ex-Google and Apple engineers perfecting… Read More

I like to think of my new Spectacles first and foremost as sunglasses. They’re cheaper than a pair of Ray-Bans ($129 for Specs vs. around $169), come with nicer lenses, the frames are beautiful, and they weigh only slightly more. And the image quality from the camera? Spec-tacular. Read More

And I honestly don’t think these things should be reviewed at all — especially as a gadget. More of a hybrid marketing/consumer research experiment than an actual product launch, Snap, nee Snapchat, Spectacles are one of the coolest, most fun bits of hardware I’ve used lately and I just scored an NES Classic. Read More

In Atlassian‘s view, video is the next battlefield in the enterprise chat wars (a war it is mostly fighting with Slack, it seems). Its HipChat group messaging app launched one-on-one video chats back in 2014, but today, it is pushing this further by launching group video chats, as well.
To enable this, Atlassian built a new video platform based on its acquisition of BlueJimp and… Read More

Around $6 million in Facebook’s Brazilian bank account has been frozen on court order in another dispute about encrypted data involving local police authorities and Facebook-owned messaging app WhatsApp, according to the local Globo G1 news service. Read More

Earlier today at the Oslo Freedom Forum, the Wickr Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to private communication and uncensored information, announced its first investment in a new secure communications and education app for human rights activists and citizen reporters called Whistler.
Around the world, thousands of citizen activists have turned to the Internet and social media as… Read More

Google announced its new messaging app Allo at its I/O developers conference today, and it looks pretty cool. It’s a feature-rich interface with graphics and doodles, and it works with Google Assistant to make suggestions and schedule plans. Allo even has an option for users to send their messages using end-to-end encryption, a security feature that has become increasingly popular and is… Read More

Those of us who have been around the block a few times have seen multiple attempts to kill email and change the way people communicate in the enterprise. Slack is just the latest, but one that has captured market share and money along the way.
Consider that just today, Slack got $200 million in funding on a whopping $3.8 billion valuation. It launched just three years ago and has raised… Read More

A few months ago, I shared with my friends how I think apps like Magic and Operator are going to be the next big thing. What makes them special is that they don’t use a traditional UI as a means of interaction. Instead, the entire app revolves around a single messaging screen. These are called invisible and conversational apps and, since my initial post, a slew of similar apps came… Read More

Latest Crunch Report

In the ongoing battle for more users and differentiation in the battle between messaging apps, today LINE has launched its newest feature: a flat-rate voice calling service called LINE Call, to expand an already existing feature that let LINE users call each other via the app. The first markets to get the service will be Android users in eight markets — Colombia, Japan, Mexico, Peru… Read More

Twitter Alerts — a service that Twitter launched in September for emergency, relief and charity organizations from the U.S., Japan and Korea to send out critical messages to opted-in users — is getting more international. Today, the newly public company is turning on Twitter Alerts in the UK and Ireland. Read More

Nimbuzz is continuing its push for South Asian dominance with its latest telco partnership. The Indian messaging startup just announced a tie-up with Hutch in Sri Lanka, offering six months of free Nimbuzz usage to Hutch subscribers.
Today’s announcement is just another in a steady string of telco partnerships that the company has been striking up. In May, it linked up with Mobilink… Read More

HootSuite has carved out a position as a popular way for businesses to manage their social media profiles on sites like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, but in its quest to become more of a one-stop “dashboard” for all social media interactions, it is adding a new feature: Conversations, an integrated, real-time messaging service, which goes live today and is available in a beta… Read More

Salesforce.com will announce new features for its “Facebook for enterprise” service Chatter this week at its annual Dreamforce conference. CEO Marc Benioff already revealed during his TechCrunch Disrupt fireside chat that the company is adding a Box/Dropbox-style file-sharing system called ChatterBox. Now I’m hearing from multiple sources that Chatter will also be getting… Read More

Yammer, the enterprise social networking company that was recently bought by Microsoft for $1.2 billion, is getting ready to add a new instant messaging feature called Online Now to its main service, enabling users to chat to each other in real time. Online Now will sit alongside existing services that let users post status updates and media as well as send private messages.
The feature… Read More

Imo.im, which you probably know as the multi-platform free instant messaging product for the web and mobile devices is launching its own real-time social network today. For now, the network is only accessible online, but the company says it will soon integrate the new features into its mobile app lineup, which currently includes apps for the iPhone/iPad, Android, BlackBerry and Nokia devices. Read More

Has Twitter killed instant messaging? That’s one possible explanation for the sudden and precipitous drop in instant message traffic in the past few years. A recent study shows that Britons spent an entire 14 percent of the online-time instant messaging back in 2007. Now? That number is a paltry 5 percent. Is IM dead, dying, or merely going through growing pains? Read More

It was only a few days ago that we tore into the 20 dollar IM+ application for being overpriced, buggy, and lacking anything that justified that 20 dollar price tag. At the tail-end of that review, we expressed our hopes that an IM app done right would come along soon. Enter Meebo for Android, brought to you by the same people behind the awesome browser-based IM application of the same name. Read More

Previously available by invite only, mundu is now available to the rest of us.
It allows you to use your Yahoo!, Google, MSN, and AIM accounts with ease.
Emphasis on “ease.” I was up and running and logged in on my iPod Touch in under a minute. Very, very simple stuff here.
You’re able to be logged in to more than one service at a time and you can make your own status… Read More

MySpace users will soon be able to call and/or instant message anyone else on the network with the click of a button, thanks to Skype. The service will be called "MySpace IM" and will be rolled out in November, although there’s a Beta version available now. It looks similar to AOL’s popular Instant Messenger program.
This news comes not a moment too soon the for two… Read More